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I was talking to a good friend about a business idea he’s been mulling. He presented his (excellent) plan for the work he’d do, and the clients he’d attract. And then he said, “And I think I’ll just charge a couple hundred bucks for it.” Because I can’t help myself, I immediately blurted out, “No.”

Everything is overwhelming. Writing the copy for your new website. Your social media marketing. Your latent guilt over not yet joining TikTok, and your growing worry that everyone else is moving faster than you are.

A lot of business owners are putting off working on their marketing strategy. They’re waiting for things to settle down, for the market to become more stable, or to simply have more certainty about the way things are going to go. But the problem is that they’re likely to be waiting forever.

Most of the small business owners and consultants we work with have, at some point, worked with other marketers before. And they’ll often come with some preconceived ideas about what they feel they should be doing.

If there’s one lesson life insists on reminding me of, it’s this: You can get what you want, but it will never be how you wanted it.

There are only two dependable ways to create a profitable business: By being meaningfully different from your competition in a way that provides greater value to a specific set of customers. Or by being so streamlined, efficient, and operationally effective that you can be the cheapest option.

When business owners seek out a new marketing plan, it’s rarely because the last plan didn’t work. It’s because, for one reason or another, the last plan wasn’t worked.